Quick Tips Guides for Blackrock Foundry

We've also got our Quick Tips guides for Blackrock Foundry for Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Healers and Tanks! These guides don't give you an in-depth discussion of every strategy and every ability, they just give you what you need to know to get through the encounter largely unscathed.

Wowhead Weekly

This week they're discussing:

Awesome Blizzard swag! We were each sent one of each Cute But Deadly mug, featuring amazing art from John Polidora; and a Hogger plushie! We give the low-down on these items, and you can see more details below!

Blizzard Gear Store Swag!

We were really happy to have some of the amazing gear from the Blizzard store to review and look over! You can see this right at the start of the show. There is also the Anniversary Sale at the Gear Store, with 40% off select items from every franchise!

Hogger Plush

The Hogger plush costs $30, and is a rather more solid plush than the murlocs or the frostwolf pup, as Perculia explains in the video.

Thanks to this more solid construction, the Hogger plush has considerably more detail than some of the other plushes. He has a shoulderpad on his left shoulder, asymmetric as there isn't one on the right, and is fully kitted out with very detailed clothing. His spiked collar is removable, so if you're hankering for a more Classic Hogger, you can remove his jewelery to get what you're after!

His gloves and belt have a leather-esque feel to them and his trousers are appropriately ragged around the edges. His fur is incredibly detailed, with the spots rendered beautifully and the mane and tail very soft. His tail is also poseable, although it isn't stiff enough to suspend him from things, like the Faerie Dragon's is.

As a result of his construction, Hogger sits really well, and his embroidered grin and hypnotic green eyes really give him a feel appropriate to the Gnoll nemesis of level ones everywhere! Hogger does not come with an in-game pet.

Cute but Deadly Mugs

These four mugs feature, from left to right, Heroes (Thrall, Varian), Heroines (Tyrande, Sylvanas), Villains (Illidan, Lich King) and Characters (Everyone). The artwork is the Cute but Deadly style, by John Polidora. The mugs are 14oz (415ml), very large indeed, and are dishwasher-safe.

Wowhead Weekly is back for another show! It's another recorded one, as Olivia's still in the UK, with her terrible rural internet. Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Olivia, where they discuss all things Warlords of Draenor, Wowhead, and more!

Wowhead Weekly is sponsored by Full Sail University. If you’ve ever considered working behind the scenes to create video games, Full Sail University offers programs that can prepare you for a future in the industry. Whether you’re interested in coding, art, producing, or mobile game development, there’s a game degree program at Full Sail University that can teach you the tools, technology, and workflow used by today’s studios.

Wowhead Weekly is back for another show! It's another recorded one, as Olivia's still in the UK, with her terrible rural internet. Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Olivia, where they discuss all things Warlords of Draenor, Wowhead, and more!

Wowhead Weekly is sponsored by Full Sail University. If you’ve ever considered working behind the scenes to create video games, Full Sail University offers programs that can prepare you for a future in the industry. Whether you’re interested in coding, art, producing, or mobile game development, there’s a game degree program at Full Sail University that can teach you the tools, technology, and workflow used by today’s studios.

Wowhead Weekly is back! We've returned from our break, with a recorded show. Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Olivia, where they discuss all things Warlords of Draenor, Wowhead, and more!

Wowhead Weekly is sponsored by Full Sail University. If you’ve ever considered working behind the scenes to create video games, Full Sail University offers programs that can prepare you for a future in the industry. Whether you’re interested in coding, art, producing, or mobile game development, there’s a game degree program at Full Sail University that can teach you the tools, technology, and workflow used by today’s studios.

The in-game quest page says you will get Thisalee Crow / Choluna as a follower, but users are reporting they are not getting this. A fix is in the works:

Blizzard

Specifically, players who have already completed the quest will be given the faction-appropriate follower after the next realm restarts; players who have not completed the quest will correctly earn the faction-appropriate follower upon completion.

Edit: Just received this info from developers to pass along and add to Zorbrix's post. =)

Garona Follower Model Has Weapons At Different Levels

Clicking over to the follower page for Legendary follower Garona Halforcen, for example, allows you to view her with her basic weapos, as well as with her mid range ilvl 645 weapons and her ilvl 660 high end weapons.

This is only currently available on a few followers but we're rolling this out to more and more as the data is added! Click on the image to enlarge it.

Wowhead Weekly is delighted to announce that Blizzard's Senior WoW PvP Designer, Brian Holinka, will join Perculia and Olivia on a special broadcast of the show today at 2pm Pacific. Wowhead's team will discuss all aspects of WoW PvP with Holinka; Ashran, the latest arena season, gearing, Garrisons and more.

Method and Wowhead to collaborate on Mythic Raiding Guides

Wowhead is really excited to announce that top guild Method will be working with us to provide Mythic raiding guides for all the bosses in Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry.

Method has been among the very best WoW guilds tier after tier, and has already reasserted their position in the Highmaul race, clearing through 5/7 bosses in their first 10 hours raiding. They're a force to be reckoned with in the World First race, having taken World Firsts in every tier in Mists of Pandaria, and we're really excited about this collaboration.

Method will be producing very detailed Mythic raiding text guides, as well as Mythic raiding video guides for each boss. In both guides, members of Method's main raid will talk through the key strategies and provide raid composition advice as well as class specific tips. As a leader in World of Warcraft raiding progression, Method is able to create these guides very early, and we look forward to seeing the first ones appear not long after their progression race is complete.

Outpost Changes

We’re planning to make some changes to the Garrison Zone Outposts, to reduce the costs necessary to change out the building you initially chose while questing through the zone, and also allow you to earn the unique follower associated with alternate building choices. Specifically, these changes will be:

The cost to change your Garrison Outpost building in Gorgrond, Talador, and Spires of Arak reduced to 5,000 gold

The cost to change your Garrison Outpost building in Nagrand reduced to 500 gold

Changing your Garrison Outpost building in a zone will also grant access to the building-specific questline for that zone, including the building-specific follower

Note that you will still be unable to change your Garrison Outpost building until you’ve reached level 100 and earned your current building’s zone achievement, at which point the building can be changed by speaking with the outpost’s foreman NPC (who varies from building to building).

These changes are currently not planned to go live until the next maintenance period for each region, but we wanted to give as much advance notice as possible that they’re on their way.

Profession Recipe Changes for Alchemy and Jewelcrafting

Blizzard Community Manager Rygarius has posted about some upcoming changes for Alchemy and Jewelcrafting. Edit: This is now live

We’re giving a heads up on adjustments being made based on player feedback over the amount of herbs used in recipes by Alchemy and Jewelcrafting. The adjustment will increase the amount of herbs an Alchemist needs and decrease the herb costs for Jewelcrafters.

Citizens of Dalaran! Raise your eyes to the skies and observe! Rhonin, Leader of the Kirin Tor, should now be reciting their spoken lines to characters within a much smaller radius in the streets of the city of Dalaran. Note that his text... his text are still worth reading and continue to still visible to those within the city.

Salvage Crate Changes

Two big Salvage Crate changes were announced Saturday night--to learn more about the Salvage Yard, check out our detailed building guide.

Watcher

It's neither nerf nor bug, but rather intended to be a rebalancing that shifts some of the incentives away from spamming low-level missions (even after you have high-level followers), in favor of making high-level missions more rewarding.

We made two changes:

Level 90-94 missions will only award a Bag of Salvaged Goods (level 1 reward) regardless of the level of your Salvage Yard.

Level 95-99 missions are unchanged. On balance, players who are trying to increase the item level of their followers should be receiving a similar number of follower upgrades as before, but hopefully with a bit less emphasis on logging in every hour or two to cycle through quick low-level missions.

Characters with over 600 skill should no longer continue to find catch-up items for the respective profession.

Items

Excavated Highmaul Thingamabob, Fungus-Infected Hydra Lung, Pulsating Brain of No'losh, and Thornmother Eye can now trigger its effect from non-healing spells as well.

Resolved an issue causing the Mists of Pandaria Legendary Cloaks and Metagems to remain effective for level 100 characters.

Continued Launch Updates

The Community team have done a great job of keeping players up to date with Blizzard's efforts to deal with the huge influx of players. See the latest information below, including the possibility of free transfers!:

November 16th Launch Updates

Blizzard

12:00 p.m. PST

Since the launch of Warlords of Draenor we’ve seen a large amount of positive reaction to the new content available in the expansion. Players have been enjoying building and managing their own Garrisons and exploring the new world. With many of the new changes that have been implemented over the past couple of days, we’ve seen a marked improvement in realm performance and stability. Thank you again to everyone for your patience while we have worked around the clock to address these issues.

As we previously posted the realms in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania had rolling restarts to pick up hotfixes to address some gameplay issues. During this time we also further extended the raised maximum realm population in these regions. While the increase in realm population has allowed more players access to the game, we continue to also see realm queues on heavily populated realms.

To address the queues for these realms we are currently working on expanding the instancing tech we deployed earlier which allowed for additional copies of Draenor. We are currently testing these improvements with the goal of deploying this tech more widely. To ensure the best possible in-game experience for players this implementation will require additional oversight and testing. We will be carefully scrutinizing and adjusting these modifications throughout the day to ensure that we don’t introduce additional stability and performance issues.

Hourly updates will resume when we have more information on the progress of these changes to share with you. If you use Twitter, we recommend following @BlizzardCS and @Warcraft for updates as well.

11:09 a.m. PST

Realms in the Americas and Oceanic regions continue to be stable and are performing well though large queues continue to be an issue to players on high population realms.

EU realms continue to be stable and are performing well but also are experiencing large queues on high population realms.

We are currently working on our larger update which we will post at approximately 12 p.m. PST with additional information. Thank you for your ongoing patience.

10:05 a.m. PST

Realms in the Americas and Oceanic regions continue to be stable and are performing well with rising queues on many high population realms.

EU realms likewise continue to perform well but are also experiencing high queues.

We are continuing to monitor performance as well as look into reports of latency (lag) and continue to look into additional solutions for high queues for these regions.

We'll provide a larger update in approximately one hour.

9:15 a.m. PST

Realms in the Americas and Oceanic regions continue to be stable and are performing well with increasing queues as more players begin to login.

EU realms continue to perform well overall and remain stable though are experiencing increased traffic resulting in long wait times to enter the game.We are continuing to monitor performance and are looking into additional reports of latency.

We will provide further updates on any additional next steps when possible. If you are reporting any additional gameplay issues,please try to include as much information as possible so that we can continue to track these issues down and get them resolved as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your ongoing patience.

8:17 a.m. PST

Realms in the Americas and Oceanic regions continue to be stable and are performing well with select realms beginning to experience queues.

EU realms continue to perform well overall and remain stable though are experiencing increased traffic resulting in long wait times to enter the game.

We are continuing to monitor performance and will provide further updates on any additional next steps when possible. If you are reporting any additional gameplay issues, please try to include as much information as possible so that we can continue to track these issues down and get them resolved.

Thank you for your ongoing patience.

----------

7:17 a.m. PSTRealms in the Americas and Oceanic regions continue to be stable and are performing well.

We've seen an increased volume of players in EU who are logging in to play which is causing high queues for many realms. We are continuing to monitor realm performance as these continue to see increased traffic– though they are performing well.

We'll provide another update in approximately one hour.

November 15th Launch Updates

Blizzard

11:00 p.m. PSTRolling restarts of all of our EU realms have proceeded through the last hour. We are currently bringing up the last group of EU realms that were restarted.

We continue to deploy new hotfixes to the game. These hotfixes are aimed at addressing gameplay issues.

The Americas and Oceania realms will undergo rolling restarts in four hours, at 3:00 a.m. PST.

10:00 p.m. PSTWe have begun rolling restarts for all EU realms. We anticipate EU realms to be available again shortly.

We have scheduled all Americas and Oceania realms for rolling restarts at 3:00 a.m. PST. This is to apply hotfixes that require a realm restart.

9:00 p.m. PSTWe are currently working hard to address a recent issue that impacted the game service for some EU realms. We are in the process of restarting the affected realms.

We will be initiating scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms, starting in an hour at 7:00 a.m. CET.

Additionally, we are scheduling all Americas and Oceania realms for rolling restarts at 3:00 a.m. PST.

8:00 p.m. PSTOver the last hour, we've temporarily raised the maximum population cap on the Lightbringer (US) realm.

We're closely monitoring all realms, and Lightbringer (US) in particular, with the intention of continuing to allow in as many players as we can support.

Several hotfixes aimed at improving server and gameplay issues, and specifically addressing Garrison issues, are set to be deployed. These particular hotfixes require rolling restarts to apply, and we are going to start by applying them to the EU realms. We have scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms to begin in approximately two hours at 7:00 a.m. CET.

7:00 p.m. PSTWe continue to monitor performance and population in North America following the increase of maximum realm population that we applied earlier.

Additionally, we’ve developed a number of hotfixes to improve server and gameplay issues, with a focus on Garrison performance. These particular hotfixes require rolling restarts to apply, and we are going to start by applying them to the EU realms. We have scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms to begin at 7:00 a.m. CET.

6:00 p.m. PST

All realms in North America, Oceania, and Europe have now had their temporary population cap increases applied. We’re continuing to work on developing and applying hotfixes for performance and gameplay issues. A number of these have already been applied and can be found here. We’ll have more updates in approximately an hour.

5:00 p.m. PST

We’ve begun the process of temporarily increasing population caps on European realms. As with the North American and Oceanic realms, we’re rolling out the increase a few realms at a time so we can monitor the results. We also have some additional performance increase hotfixes in production, which we are planning to try out shortly on the North American realm Lightbringer. We will have another update in approximately an hour.

- - -

4:00 p.m. PST

All North American and Oceanic realms have now had their population caps increased. We are continuing to monitor realm stability, and plan to begin testing the increase on European realms soon. In addition, we’re making progress towards correcting an issue that would occasionally cause players to get stuck on flight paths when flying to their Garrison. Our next update will occur in roughly one hour.

3:00 p.m. PST

Our initial tests to increase realm capacity were successful, so we’ve continued to roll out our testing of increased population caps to additional North American and Oceanic realms. We’re also making steady progress to resolve the issues causing instance, world, and Garrison server crashes in Europe. We’ll provide another update approximately one hour from now.

2:10 p.m. PST

After carefully monitoring server performance for the last few hours, we are now testing raising realm capacity above normal population caps. We’re going to temporarily increase the population cap on a few realms in North America, and observe them closely. Our next update will be in approximately an hour.

1:00 p.m. PST

We are continuing to optimize servers and address additional performance issues. Realms appear stable with the increased population caps. We are monitoring server stability as Europe continues through peak play time and populations increase in the Americas. We’ll provide further updates in approximately one hour.

12:00 p.m. PST

As previously posted, both Europe and the Americas/Oceanic realms went into an off-peak maintenance to upgrade realm hardware, and implement a new Draenor-wide instancing tech to improve game performance. Both regions’ maintenances concluded successfully, and so far we’ve seen very positive results, allowing us to dramatically raise the realm population caps for all realms. We’re going to continue optimizing the in-game experience, focus on the new instancing tech, and hotfix gameplay issues as they come up.

We’re currently seeing a very high demand on the game and game services due to the exceptionally large number of people excited to play Warlords of Draenor. We’re focusing on a few specific issues, one of which is a group of realms in Europe that are seeing increased instance, world, and Garrison server crashes. That’s being addressed as an isolated issue and we’re investigating the cause to ensure it doesn’t occur elsewhere.

We’ll be looking into the possibility of Free Character Transfers for our highest population realms, but first we need to get the service to a place where we feel it’s also able to process a potentially large number of transfers while not adversely affecting service stability.

Our next steps are to continue working on the few performance issues we’re tracking in Europe, and continue maintaining and improving the level of service in the Americas and Oceania. We’ll provide another update in an hour.3:00 p.m. CET/11.00am PST

We’re working to mitigate some localized instance and Garrison server crashes in Europe. We’re still seeing what we would expect to see in the Americas/Oceanic region for high queues on very populace realms, and for Europe there are queues across the majority of realms during their peak play time. We’ll provide a more comprehensive update in an hour on where the service currently stands as a whole, and what else we’re working on.

10:00 a.m. PST

We’re continuing to monitor the realms post-maintenance. Realms are being maintained at their raised population caps, and while many realms no longer have queues, we do expect that high population realms will still see a wait to log in. We’ll continue to provide updates throughout the day.

9:00 a.m. PSTWe’re continuing to monitor realms and track any individual issues as they occur. We’re still seeing some issues occurring now that Europe is in their peak playtime, but with greatly reduced frequency compared to before maintenance.

All realms are now set back up to their normal population caps. Queues being experienced now are due to demand beyond what the realms are normally capable of handling, and we’ll be looking into how to reduce them further.

Gazlowe's Realty

As part of the advertizing Blizzard has done for Warlords of Draenor, they've created a cute site called www.gazlowerealty.com. The site resembles a realtor's website, offering "hot deals" on various Garrison buildings, such as Frostfire Foreclosures, Outposts in Nagrand and more.

Community Member Coverville noticed this advert in the LA Times for Gazlowe's Realty:

And what's even better is the contact elements of the sites work! You can call the number -- 1-844-GAZLOWE (295693) -- to hear a pre-recorded message from the Goblin Realtor himself, and sending an information request in to the site results in this reply:

Dear Valued Gold Owner,

Thank you for submitting an inquiry, question or inappropriate message regarding one of our incredible garrison deals in Draenor. We apologize, but all of our email response goblins are busy helping other customers at the moment. Time is money, friend.

But do visit warlords.com for any additional information you might need on garrisons, Draenor or the army of brutal savages that are currently ravaging the planet.